Saturday, June 20, 2015

How You Say It

I don't know when I started to notice that people are kind of mean to each other a lot. Probably when I was a little girl and the modus operandi in my family was a sharp tongue full of insult and jab. Something like this:

"Oh! I love horses! They're so beautiful! I wish I could get one."

"Like that would ever happen. Horses are too expensive, and you wouldn't take care of it anyway. Horse. Yeah, right." Laughter.

Yep. How funny.

When I remember things like this I always feel guilty for thinking of the people I love most in the world with such unkind thinking. Were they really mean to me? Did they really act like I was stupid? Stupid to have big dreams? Ridiculous to think that big things could happen for me? Like getting a horse? Was it a form of protection? Don't dream too big, you might get hurt. As hurt as both my parents were by their parents who didn't indulge their dreams either. If you act like something is stupid then no one gets too hurt when it doesn't come true.

The other day in the woods I had this moment of forgiveness for my father. I realized what a broken heart he must have had from his own childhood. How hard it must have been for him to be open hearted and love someone like me: someone he loved fiercely and with fear because I could hurt him too. How he knew exactly what it felt like to imagine the magic and then see the reality.

I am sensitive to the smart ass way people talk to me. I have a lot of people around me who aren't able to have polite conversation, they just string together tiny insults and act like that's communicating. Maybe that's been me and I'm finally growing out of it.

Once when I was at my naturopath she did guided imagery with me. Afterwards she told me she could tell when I stopped holding up my protected version of me and became myself. The funny thing about that was I could tell, too. I knew exactly what she meant. I can tell all the time when I'm my safe version of myself and when I can feel just like me.

Drinking made it easy to forget that a me existed. It made it easier to put myself out into a world that I felt unsafe and crazy in. It made it easier to hate myself so when people talked to me like I was an idiot I could easily believe it was true. Years of this built a shell that isn't so easy to slough off even though I really really want to.

It isn't really so much what you say as how you say it. It's letting down the I'm so stupid of it all and just being who you really are. It's knowing that even if the whole world lined up and pointed at you and said "Yeah, right" you can still say to yourself "Yeah. RIGHT."


Saturday, June 13, 2015

Settling

Our house is settling. We watched a show about sinkholes and then days later up the street appeared a spray painted note on the road: sinkhole. My youngest sons' door jamb is separating at what to me seems like an alarming rate, or maybe it's just more than any other door jamb separation I've ever witnessed, which to date is only this one. I still am not 100% convinced that we aren't going to wake up in the middle of the night suffocating under the collapsing floorboards even though no one else seems as worried as me.

My life is settling too. I was thinking about the house and it sort of mooshing itself down in the dry earth just by the pressure of its' own weight. Getting steady. Me too, I thought. This is me too. I spent a long time resisting pushing myself into the ground not quite sure of where to stand. It's one of those things like every damn sober thing: you just know when you're there. I picture a bird on a wire- flying in, feet out, catching on, and then shaking out its' wings. Then settled. Settling.

Then I thought of all the settling I did with my life before I got sober. How I settled for being a shadow of the woman I am. How I settled for being a drunk. How I settled for next day hangovers, one night stands, blackouts, forgotten fights. This is my life, I thought. I can't undo it all. I settled for it. Finished, I thought. Done deal.





This picture was taken at the start of my very worst year (2008-2009). I know now that I had a whopping case of post partum depression and being an alcoholic made it so much worse. I was trying so hard to settle in to being the woman it looks like I am in the picture, but in reality I was flailing all over the place. No safe place to land- wings and feet everywhere. Staying out all night. Dabbling in a little cocaine. Training for a marathon and picking up smoking again. Digging into the quicksand of my life over and over and over and over again. Somehow I found my feet around the end of the year and stopped behaving like a maniac. Still drinking, but no more all nighters, no more drugs. I settled for the shame of it and hid from the repercussions by acting like it never really happened. Even now thinking of that time gives me a vacant pit in my middle.

Recovering from that one year took a lot of forgiveness. If you want to know how magic your husband is, be a drunken fucked up asshole for a whole year with a new baby and a four year old and he forgives and loves you anyway.

Going back there is hard. It helps to remind myself how far I've come from that woman to this one: two and a half years sober. It helps to feel that hurt because I am made up of all the good and bad that's been done. It helps because I know that bad won't be done again: I don't drink anymore so I don't forget who I am anymore.

There is a fierce comfort in the settling my life is doing. A rightness. I am establishing myself as this woman I am today, and leaving behind the shaky ground I inhabited for so many years. Resolving the argument between who I was then and who I am now. I am settling down, settling in. Settled.



Monday, June 8, 2015

Two and a Half Years

I had an idea to make a Soberbia Instagram page. So I did it.

You can find it there with this: s.o.b.e.r.b.i.a

I was two and a half years sober yesterday. This Brian Andreas picture hangs on the wall at 6 1/2 year old height outside my sons' room. It says:

"There has never been a day when I have not been proud of you, I said, though some days I'm louder about other stuff so it's easy to miss that."

With two and a half years has come more quiet, and more proud. I'm more apt to notice how proud I am rather than henpeck tiny mistakes imagined or real. I got down on my knees in the woods yesterday by my tree and gave prayer and thanks- thanks to the woods, thanks to my spirit, thanks to myself, thanks to all of my sobriety, to my family, to my heart. I find that with all this gratitude comes humility- a sense of being huge and small all at once. A sense of belonging in the world and to the world that is still so new to me. The last six months have been especially transformative- I suspect it's because I decided to be in charge of my life again. Not in control, in charge. There have been so many days in my life when I have not been proud of me. But now I'm much louder about the other stuff, so it's easier to miss that.


Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Adapting



It's raining here today so I started messing around with the look of my blog. I'm never very happy with it, so every so often I change it. Then I think about moving over to Wordpress. Then I think I should maybe make my own page. But I don't know how to do that, and I have lots of posts I want to write but then I don't and so I'm going to start there.

I heard something the other day on NPR about survival of the fittest and how that it really isn't based so much on being the fastest or the strongest or the best, but on the ability to adapt. It went straight into my brain with a zoom and I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

I have a friend who gives up drinking every several weeks or so. I don't really know why, but my guess is that things go sideways and in that way we drinkers do he has that moment of clarity: Hey... things are fucked up because I drink too much. And so he quits for some days, but always goes back.

He was complaining about being bored. There's nothing to do, he says, if I'm not drinking. I say be patient, you will think of some things. Not drinking takes practice.

It takes practice, and adaptation. I feel like I am just now getting to the part where I am actually changing my life: where I am totally comfortable being sober and my foundation is really strong and I'm much less afraid to try new things. I think about the ways I adapted when I first quit drinking: giant glasses of seltzer and grapefruit, going to bed right after dinner, up at dawn to write and do yoga because that made me feel needed and like I just had to be sober. I think about the ways I am adapting now: I'm finally, finally comfortable taking care of myself.

I am slowly but surely adapting my life to fit my idea of my life. I am only working the job I don't like for six hours a week. I have been keeping promises to myself- this has been HUGE and all started almost three months ago with my tiny promise to floss my teeth every day. Then I got bigger and promised to write three pages a day. Then I promised myself I was going to eat right and start running again. Then I added meditating every day. Writing them out like that makes them seem so....small, sort of; maybe more like simple. But it's working. I still don't quite believe that all it took was to keep one small promise, but it was all it took.

I run in the woods. I have three birch trees that rely on me to be there, and when I get to the last one I stop and make a circle with my water around her base. She has a strong trunk that branches out into four smaller trunks that reach into the sky and make all the branches that make up the whole tree. A trunk for everyone in my family-me, my husband, our children- united by the strong base. After I make my circle I press my head to her side, place my palms on the bark, and close my eyes. I say a prayer of gratitude. I cry every  time. I don't care if anyone sees me. I let go of the world for a minute and reach deep inside to really feel my gratitude.

With these smaller promises have come moments like this: moments when I am brave enough to pray at the base of a beautiful birch tree, moments where I am brave enough to run, when I have the courage to let myself be guided by my heart and not by the what ifs of money. Because I am seeing that I can change I am changing. I am not the strongest, or the best, or the fastest. I am the one who is adapting.